Fuel consumption was expected to be less critical at Sepang than Melbourne. But with the mercury soaring well above 30C, tyre conservation has emerged as one of the major challenges of the weekend.

According to Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery the medium tyre offers a lap time gain of 1-1.2 seconds. But over a race stint drivers found they lost pace over a stint much more quickly than they did in Melbourne, as the graph below demonstrates.

Another notable development during qualifying was the number of driving errors. One major consequences of cars with less downforce and much more torque is that corners which were once ‘easy flat’ now require a feather of the throttle – a considerably more challenging act given the power delivery of the new engines.

That’s why we saw Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa heading off backwards at turn eight and Lewis Hamilton slewing wide in turn ten. These were much less challenging corners in the downforce-smothered cars of years past. Here’s hoping the rebalancing of power versus grip in the new F1 cars is here to stay.

The other major talking point of the weekend is likely to be fuel sensors. Already Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has acknowledged his team have had another faulty sensor and indicated Toro Rosso had two more. Almost every driver’s fuel flow rate was checked during second practice.

Red Bull are standing their ground on the issue as they prepare to take their appeal to the FIA. But would they disobey the FIA’s instructions again if they continue to have fuel sensor trouble tomorrow? We should know around six hours after the chequered flag falls on Sunday…

Longest stint comparison

This chart shows all the drivers’ lap times (in seconds) during their longest unbroken stint:

http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/charts/2014drivercolours.csv

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Sebastian Vettel

104.28

104.454

104.744

104.674

104.848

106.058

107.095

105.131

107.545

105.252

105.185

105.396

106.091

Daniel Ricciardo

106.738

105.863

106.162

105.857

109.699

106.361

106.18

106.959

107.354

107.906

109.537

Lewis Hamilton

103.756

106.479

103.529

104.624

104.529

105.094

105.539

105.124

108.81

106.142

Nico Rosberg

104.121

104.353

104.438

104.647

114.394

104.8

104.651

105.17

108.328

105.879

Fernando Alonso

105.065

104.562

105.201

105.089

105.276

107.066

106.813

107.228

Kimi Raikkonen

105.845

105.554

105.046

104.964

105.47

105.492

107.938

106.585

106.719

106.673

106.5

Romain Grosjean

104.005

106.693

104.464

104.447

111.733

107.969

104.37

Pastor Maldonado

Jenson Button

107.634

107.557

106.506

106.341

110.121

107.053

107.118

107.292

108.606

108.913

Kevin Magnussen

106.89

106.785

109.747

106.751

107.154

107.922

110.224

109.009

110.056

Nico Hulkenberg

104.106

104.495

105.052

106.128

105.373

105.87

106.448

106.777

107.468

Sergio Perez

105.45

105.779

105.909

105.884

105.961

106.241

108.233

106.806

107.463

107.851

Adrian Sutil

108.639

105.314

105.582

107.139

107.556

107.7

106.598

Esteban Gutierrez

106.256

107.053

106.602

107.187

107.355

107.682

107.788

107.337

108.332

108.022

108.96

108.933

Jean-Eric Vergne

105.23

104.878

105.28

105.526

106.104

106.551

106.639

106.63

107.114

108.93

Daniil Kvyat

105.443

104.079

104.632

105.821

105.589

106.358

109.255

117.274

Felipe Massa

104.094

104.672

105.231

106.299

105.889

105.284

106.532

106.387

106.205

107.544

107.419

109.004

108.566

Valtteri Bottas

110.311

104.406

104.71

105.974

105.449

105.317

106.448

108.011

106.686

111.162

Jules Bianchi

107.505

110.15

108.61

108.794

112.402

109.173

108.861

108.919

108.476

108.736

109.441

Max Chilton

109.09

108.596

108.79

109.12

109.182

109.375

110.723

Marcus Ericsson

116.21

112.285

109.29

109.11

113.1

110.232

110.426

108.876

109.418

112.06

110.887

110.457

111.669

113.072

113.306

Ferrari look much more competitive following their disappointing Australian Grand Prix weekend. Kimi Raikkonen in particular enjoyed possibly his best day in the F14 T so far this year.

“This was definitely a positive day and I had a better feeling compared to Friday in Melbourne,” he said afterwards.

Raikkonen said he was “more comfortable” in the car and had “no problems whatsoever”.

The handling seemed to be good even if, as we found on the race simulation, we will have to pay very close attention to degradation, which is particularly high here.”

Comparing the sector times of the two Mercedes drivers gives a clear indication how much pace the W05s have in hand. Lewis Hamilton gave away three-tenths of a second to Nico Rosberg in the middle sector and vice-versa in the last. Even taking into consideration the possibility of differing set-ups, there’s clearly plenty of pace in the W05 we didn’t see today.

“Pastor [Maldonado] then suffered from a turbo-related problem with his car. This meant we needed to remove the engine and subsequently he was unable to run in the afternoon.

“Romain [Grosjean] was able to get some more laps in the afternoon, however a wiring issue caused difficulties with his gearbox. More lessons learnt, and we’ll be focusing on getting as much mileage as possible tomorrow.”

27 comments on “Heat and fuel sensors the talking points in Malaysia”

Hm, as far as fuel sensors etc go, this is a very informative piece from AMuS (German), a lot from the FIA press conference earlier, some bits from what Horner said erlier, but also some interesting details like:

My quick translation from German of that paragraph:The first thought, that because Caterham and Lotus are having trouble, there is some issue having to do with the Total fuel was not confirmed. STR uses Cepsa fuel.
But then it came to light that three teams apparently modified their Sensors. These changes are made at the fuel supply and their connections to the sensors. Not with malicious intent, but for assembly/construction needs. One of those teams is Red Bull

A genuine question, is it confirmed info. that STR use Cepsa fuel? Because I heard before despite the fact that they are often sponsored by various oil companies, in practice teams powered by the same engine manufacturer are supplied with fuel from a single company which would be a factory team have a contract with.

@jimg Interesting question. I don’t know if you could be black flagged for breaching the technical regulations during a race, or if it is something that can only be punished by post-race exclusion. I suppose you could be black flagged for disobeying the instructions of the race director, though. Or there is always the black flag with orange spot (your car has a technical problem, sort it out) to fall back on.l

In “Sector times and ultimate lap times” how is the “Deficit to best” calculated? I would have assumed it was the fastest time from each sector added together to create their best possible lap time. This makes no sense when in six out of seven cases of drivers actual fastest laps being equal to their ultimate lap their quickest sector times were all set on different laps. If the deficit to best is 0.000 you would expect the sector times to be from the same lap.

That is how they are calculated @jimbo. Since we don’t have sector times from each lap for every driver I’m assuming the drivers with deficit of 0.000, did indeed set their fastest time with 3 sector PBs.

I may be wrong, but unless there is a spreadsheet with every sector time for every lap for each driver, I’m taking it as described above.

Ferrari seems to be confirmed as 3rd engine on the speed trap. I think it became quite clear after melbourne that the engine with less peak power is Ferrari but they did manage to be the most reliable in Melbourne which is definitely even more critical in Malaysia that combined with the fact that there’s less demand on both fuel and power in malaysia perhaps Ferrari teams will do as the practice suggest. Marussia, and Sauber in particular seemed to be more in place, that said Ferrari tends to run light in practice so in the end Ferrari fans shouldn’t get ahead of themselves.

@peartree if there’s one strength Ferrari has had in recent years it’s been reliability, which has been second to none. Part of that has been down to the reliability of their engines, and so far it looks like they’ve managed to retain that trait in the new engines. That could certainly help them in the early races this year, but so far we haven’t seen anywhere near the kind of failure rates that many were predicting, so maybe it won’t be such a huge advantage after all. Seems it’s easier to work towards reliability with a blindingly quick car than to coax speed out of a slow car built like a tank.

What surprises me in the speed trap data is the difference between the Toro Rosso.
All the other teams cars are very close in top speed as you might expect with fixed gear ratio’s.
But these two are quite far apart; are different cars allowed different gear ratio’s or is this all areo setup?

Boy oh boy, the McLaren’s look painfully slow in the long runs! That, coupled with the embarrassingly bare team-clothing and car (in terms of sponsors)… and it looks to me as though McLaren are well and truly on their way to becoming a midfield team now

@gdewilde I did consider that, and the proof is in the pudding, so we won’t know until Sunday night. However, what’s the point of an analysis article if you neglect to read into it? I’m just going off the data, but yes, they could be 2s a lap faster than everyone on Sunday.

You can’t use Button’s data for long-run comparison though. Only him and Ricciardo from the top 5 teams (MSC, McL, FER, RBR, WIL) was on Hard tyres first and then switched to Mediums. The rest were in reverse. They don’t refuel between the switch. Magnussen seemed to be dealing with some set-up or mechanical issues in the afternoon, so I wouldn’t read much into his.

@matt90 As any good CEO would. Even with a new title sponsor, they’ll have a tonne less sponsors than their rivals, although that seems to be the McLaren way. It’s much nicer having a clean looking car, as opposed to one with 20-odd companies’ logos stuck on haha!

One thing that piqued my interest when Ron Dennis claimed they’d have a title sponsor within a few rounds, was the fact that he said they’d had many offers, but none of them truly valued McLaren for what it’s worth (in his eyes). Ron is a tough nut to crack, and has been out of F1 for years now. The McLaren he left was right at the top and the very name probably struck fear into competitors’ hearts. This most-likely lead to massive valuation for sponsor deals. I just wonder if Ron is stuck back there, thinking McLaren are serious top dogs worth pre-08 cash. It’s unlikely because you don’t get to his level without being very business-savvy, but his stubbornness is playing on my mind..

After the AGP I had dared to hope that we wouldn’t be hearing about tyre degradation again as a major factor in race performance, c’mon Pirelli we have more than enough random unreliability with the PUs, we don’t need manufactured frailty thrown in on top.

I took the first 10 laps (used only 9 of the laps for each as one of the laps was a slowdown lap due to a breakdown) of Lewis’, Seb’s and Kimi’s and looked at the combined time it took to complete:
Kimi: 952.33 secs
Seb: 946.52 secs
Lewis: 944.81 secs

You cannot draw a definitive conclusion from here (as Mercedes and Red Bull usually run heavier than Ferrari in practice and the idea of Mercedes sandbagging too). All you can suggest is that the Mercedes and Red Bull will be the two fighting for the podium places, whereas Ferrari are the best of the rest hoping their reliability will help them too a good haul of points.